Ryan Griffis currently teaches new media art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He often works under the name Temporary Travel Office and collaborates with many other writers, artists, activists and interesting people in the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor.The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces. The Travel Office has operated in a variety of locations, including Missouri, Chicago, Southern California and Norway.

On the topic of convergences between cybernetics and design, there's also the rather wild Chilean Cybersyn project.

In 1970, Dr. Salvador Allende was elected President of Chile. Against the wishes of the United States, Allende and his Popular Unity government hoped to create "the Chilean Way to Socialism," La vía chilena al socialismo. Allende and Fernando Flores, his 29-year-old minister of finance (now philosopher and management consultant) were faced with the challenge of managing newly nationalized industry but hoped to avoid the top-down methods of the Soviet model. As a doctor, Allende was attracted to scientific methods and when Flores proposed a technocratic means of controlling the industry, he agreed, hiring on his recommendation British management guru/scientist/visionary Stafford Beer to create Project Cybersyn, a system with which to monitor the output of factories, the flow of materials, rates of absenteeism, and other indicators on a daily basis.

Through Project Cybersyn, Beer hoped to implant an electronic "nervous system" into Chilean society. The country would be linked together via a vast communications network to create what the Guardian calls a "socialist Internet." Finding about 500 abandoned TELEX machines in a factory, Beer networked these together to a provide input for software written by Chilean engineers in consultation with British engineers from Arthur Anderson called Cyberstrider that used Bayesian statistics to create a self-learning control system.

If we leave aside its historical precedents, Software
Art, in its classical definition formalized by the
Jury Statement of "Transmediale 2001" [1] and extended
by Florian Cramer [2], saw the light in 1997 with The
Web Stalker of the English Group I/O/D and with the
theoretical speculation started by one of the software
authors, Matthew Fuller. Right from this first
example and definitions, Software Art reveals its
radical nature. The fact itself of transforming
software from a mere instrument into "subject" and
"content" of a cultural and artistic reflection
represents a Copernican revolution liable to be
considered as heresy. Similarly heretic is the idea of
adopting a language (HTML), a protocol of
communication (HTTP) and
the whole system of cultural objects (the web) and
make them visible in a ...

Invitation to Create and Exhibit Posters

You are invited to create posters through Andy Deck's Imprimaturhttp://turbulence.org/Works/imprimatur/. All posters created during February, March and April will be displayed at HTTP Gallery and the surrounding public spaces for the next exhibition, 'Open Vice Virtue: the online art context'. Also photographs of posters displayed in public locations will be documented on the HTTP website. So please download, print out and paste up archived posters in your own localities - send your photos to info[at]http.uk.net

"Imprimatur consists of an online 'groupware' for poster illustration and layout accessible through a computer workstation installed in the gallery space. Visitors can use the software to create their own poster in collaboration with their online counterparts. This piece provides a framework for visitors/ participants to launch a personal poster campaign based on their own social and political concerns. This DIY approach revives the tradition of poster-making as a medium of mass communication and persuasion developed during the 20th century. The posters will by displayed as part of the exhibition and will circulate freely beyond the gallery walls, appearing in surrounding streets, schools, libraries, kitchens and bedrooms."

A hugely important topic. Much of what we enjoy about the Internet is hardwired into law. Now telecom providers try to speed up their own services over that of others using (and already paying for) their network. Recently, I was surprised how little debate with the Verizon representative there was when I cancelled my home phone with them. "I am just using my cell phone." They were just fine with that as they also occupy the cell phone market. (Try canceling your American Express credit card: good luck. It will take at least 20 minutes until they take no for an answer.) On C-Span I followed the debate on Internet Neutrality. The proposal was that congress should pass law forbidding discrimination against competing Web services. The CEO of Google and Larry Lessig, among others, gave testimony. If a company like Google introduces video applications- should they (ie. Google) have to pay the ISP for the extra bandwidth that the users of this service use up? The same issue comes up with voice over (ip)telephony. Download Lessig'a testimony here (pdf).

If you google Reality Hacking, the highest ranked site is Swiss artist Peter Regli's realityhacking.com Regli has been working on the theme of "Reality Hacking" for ten years now, undertaking subtle, humorous, weird, and sometimes not-so-subtle interventions into everyday reality that he subsequently records on his site. More about Regli in this ArtForum article.